October 17, 2011

The paperback edition of Filip Müller’s book Eye Witness Auschwitz was “published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum” in 1999, twenty years after the book was first published in 1979. His description of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau matches many of the details in the description given by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli who published his book Auschwitz, A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account in 1960.

Müller was a prisoner at Auschwitz from April 1942 until January 18, 1945 when he left the camp on a “death march.” Dr. Nyiszli arrived at the Auschwitz II camp, aka Birkenau, on a transport with other Hungarian Jews in May 1944, and left on the same “death march” out of the camp. Both ended up at the Mauthausen camp in Austria, where they both stayed for a few days before being sent to the Melk sub-camp of Mauthausen. Could they have met at Melk and compared notes on their work at Auschwitz-Birkenau?

Both Müller and Dr. Nyiszli were members of the Sonderkommando squads that worked, and lived, inside the gas chamber buildings at Birkenau. Dr. Nyiszli was a doctor who did autopsies at Birkenau, while Müller was a lowly prisoner who carried the victims out of the gas chamber, first at the main Auschwitz camp and later at the Birkenau camp.

Dr. Nyiszli wrote his book first, so if either of them copied from the other, it was Müller who copied from Dr. Nyiszli. Yet it was Müller who had 3 years of first-hand experience in the gruesome task of entering the gas chamber and carrying the bodies to the incinerator ovens. Dr. Nyiszli was at Birkenau for only 8 months and there was no reason why he would have been required to enter a gas chamber.

Did Dr. Miklos Nyiszli get his information about the gas chambers from Filip Müller? In 1945 when both were rescued by American troops from a sub-camp of Mauthausen, Müller was a naive, uneducated 23-year-old while Dr. Nyiszli was a much more sophisticated 44-year-old doctor. Did Dr. Nyiszli steal the gas chamber story from Müller and profit from the gas chamber experience of Müller?

On page 13 of his book, Müller mentioned that he ate some cheese and poppyseed cake that he found in the luggage in the gas chamber. Dr. Nyiszli was a medical doctor and he would have known that this was impossible, so he didn’t include this detail in his book.

On page 60 of his book, Müller mentions that there was a morgue in one of the Birkeanau gas chamber buildings. Elsewhere in his book, he also mentions a morgue room that was separate from the gas chamber room and the undressing room. On page 60, he wrote: “When we entered the morgue, we found lying in a heap some 200 emaciated corpses, all of whom had obviously died of hunger, disease or exhaustion. They had been thrown down the concrete shute from the yard into the mortuary basement.”

The ruins of the crematoria at Birkenau do not show that there were three rooms: a gas chamber, an undressing room and a third room for storing the bodies of the prisoners who had died from disease. Müller published his book in 1979, by which time he was 57 years old; apparently he was already losing his memory and he consulted the plans for the Krema III gas chamber building which originally called for a “corpse slide” but a concrete shute was never built. Dr. Nyiszli did not make this mistake in his book.

Filip Müller and Dr. Miklos Nyiszli are to Holocaust history what Fred Leuchter and Germar Rudolf are to Holocaust revisionism. Both Leuchter and Rudolf climbed down into the ruins of the Krema II gas chamber at Birkenau and both gave a description which did not match what Müller and Dr. Nyiszli described. Neither Leuchter nor Rudolf found evidence of the holes through which the Zyklon-B pellets were allegedly poured, and neither of them found any evidence of the “hollow pillars of sheet metal” which kept the pellets from being scattered on the floor of the gas chamber. Both Müller and Dr. Nyiszli mentioned the hollow pillars in their accounts of the gas chambers at Birkenau.

On page 60, Müller also wrote this: “Mounted on the ceiling was a large number of dummy shower heads made of metal.” He was describing Krema II, the same gas chamber into the ruins of which both Leuchter and Rudolf descended and found no showerheads.

On page 65, Müller wrote: “The hair was cut after the women had been gassed.” Remember that he was writing this in 1979 after the Auschwitz Museum had already been set up with exhibits including a large glass case of human hair. Hair does not deteriorate. In the Victorian era, women used to make framed pictures out of hair cut from their heads. In a Museum in Scotland, I saw a lock of hair from Bonnie Prince Charlie which had not deteriorated over the years. However, the hair in the Auschwitz Museum is badly deteriorated; it has obviously been subjected to Zyklon-B to kill any lice because it was intended to be sent to Germany to be used in making cloth. After the women were gassed at Auschwitz, the hair would have been filled with excrement and it would have been hard to clean. The German people are noted for being efficient; I think they would have cut the hair off before sending the women into the gas chamber.

On page 81, Müller wrote: “Thus, a towel slung over their arm and clutching a cake of soap, they entered, all unsuspecting, the three gas chambers of crematorium 5.” Where have I heard the soap and towels story before? Now I remember: it was at Dachau that the American liberators found soap and towels in the undressing room for the gas chamber. Did Müller borrow this detail from the Dachau story? Or were there three shower rooms in Crematorium 5 at Birkenau?

The first Jews who were sent to Auschwitz were from Slovakia, the state that had broken off from Czechslovakia, and was allied with Germany during World War II.

In the forward to Müller’s book, Professor Yehuda Bauer of Yad Vashem wrote this:

Why did Müller not publish his memoir before? He did in a way. He returned to his Czechoslovak home after the war. A summary of his testimony was included in a book in 1946 (published in English in 1966 as The Death Factory by O. Kraus and E. Kulka).

So now the truth comes out: Müller was the first to write a description of the gas chambers in 1946. Dr. Nyiszli wrote his book in 1947.

It is my personal opinion that Dr. Nyiszli never saw the inside of any gas chamber and he got his information from Filip Müller, who entered the gas chambers at Auschwitz and Birkenau many times over a period of three years and even lived, for a time, in the undressing room of crematorium 4, as he wrote on page 147 of his book. On the same page, he wrote: “some of us (Sonderkommandos) made their quarters in the lofts of crematorium 2 and 3.” Dr. Nyiszli claimed that he lived in crematorium 1, but he obviously meant crematorium 3 because he mentioned that it was near the soccer field. Crematorium 1 was in the main Auschwitz camp.

There are some revisionists who don’t believe that Dr. Nyiszli was ever at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I find it strange that both Dr. Nyiszli and Filip Müller were sent to Mauthausen and then to the Melk sub-camp. What are the chances of that? Dr. Nyiszli could have faked his whole book, based on the experience of Filip Müller.